Thiruvananthapuram: With the aim of encouraging innovation training at the intersection of design thinking and digital technologies, the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) is conducting its first-ever Summer School programme in India in association with the Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) in Kochi from December 3 to 21.

Founded in 2008, the CIID is one of the top global design schools. It focuses solely on interaction design, which combines traditional design with socio-technological trends. It is also one of the few places where technology is used as a tool inside art, psychology, music etc.

The CIID Summer School programme will consist of a series of 12 workshops, covering a range of subjects from Interaction Design and Service Design to designing with Blockchain, Machine Learning, and Designing Connected Products.

The workshops are designed to unlock the creative potential of students and professionals working in government, companies, organizations, and startups. The participants will learn how to practice life-centred design, embrace new technologies, and accelerate the pace of innovation in their work and daily lives.

Led by experts from all over the world, the CIID Summer School uses the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a context of learning, innovating and deploying. Most workshops have a topic, a challenge or an opportunity, and even though the workshops run around design briefs they are not created to draft solutions for a particular problem or opportunity, but to acquire new approaches and competencies to embrace future challenges differently.

The programme offers 50% super early-bird seat until September 15th with a fee of $650 per five-day workshop. For every week there will be three to four different types of workshops for the participants to choose from.

Participants can join for a single week or choose two to three consecutive workshops to create their own curriculum. The one-week-long workshops have been designed to be stand-alone and run from Monday to Friday, from 9am till 5pm.

“The unique feature of the programme is that the participants with any background or expertise, can attend it and understand how to incorporate design principles in their day to day work”, said Dr. Saji Gopinath, CEO, KSUM. For making the most out of the program the participants should have an appetite for learning and willingness to cooperate in a team, he added.

These workshops will encourage participants to work intensely in a short period of time, going through a series of engaging learning and sharing sessions to understand the design processes and the use of new technologies.

“Design is the missing layer in our technological ecosystem and CIID is one of world’s best design institutes which can help us build that layer and inspire us to create technologies that are focused on people and life,” said Arvind Sanjeev, former fellow, KSUM and alumnus of CIID.

The unique feature of the programme is that the participants can be from different countries , with range in age, seniority, and expertise, but with a shared a passion for applying newly acquired skills and tools in their work and lives. They should